I have several projects that were initially created as large, waterfall-style projects, which have since been revised to a more agile workflow. In so doing, we now have large lists of projects that have been whittled down to smaller chunks, with phases and subtasks accordingly. To reduce the “project clutter” on the left, I’d like to take a project and convert it to a task. In theory, all I actually care to do is to move the project’s tasks into a parent task, and then put that parent task into a grouping project. However, converting a project to a task isn’t possible, and even the option to move a task to a subtask doesn’t work, as I would have to drag each task into the parent task one at a time (there are hundreds of tasks). I would like to see an option to either (a) convert a project with tasks to a task with subtasks, or (b) provide a way to batch move a set of tasks into a parent task as subtasks.

@spye Here is a possible workaround.
Create your destination Project.
Select the Tasks/Sections from your starting project, if you want all click on the first task hold shift and click on the last task.
In the right had window it will have the number of tasks selected.
Then do Tab+P will allow you to assign all of those tasks to your new project.
You can then click the ‘x’ near the starting project to remove all those tasks from your waterfall project.

Hi Jason! That’s a great tip for moving a set of tasks from one project to another, but what I’m looking for is a way to move a set of tasks inside another task, making them all subtasks, so that I can then move that parent task to another project. In effect, this would allow me to take a project filled with tasks, and convert that to a task filled with subtasks. Right now, I can create a single task, and then drag another same-level task inside it as a subtask. But what I can’t do is create a task, and then drag 100+ tasks into another task as subtasks.

(b) provide a way to batch move a set of tasks into a parent task as subtasks.

I just tried this for a bit and I don’t believe there’s a way to do it, as you have to have the parent task highlighted for when you drag the task, and you can’t do that and have multiple tasks selected. I hope I’m wrong though!

I am curious though about your need for this, as having hundreds of tasks - as you say - now suddenly as subtasks seems a bit heavy, despite the clutter of lots of projects. Maybe a solution could be something like keeping the projects, but using tags for the workflow? So you can have your main project with everything in there, but using tags or (ideally) custom fields for sorting or searching?

Hi Caisha… In this case (software development projects) we have several sub-projects within a broader set of applications. Previously, we’d set up each project relative to the project itself, whereas now, we’re tracking relative to a product. So we are maintaining agile projects that are constantly having new tasks added to the queue and processed accordingly. In some cases, we had created a “bug fix” project to deal with a plethora of old bugs. Many of those are repeat tasks or duplicates, but we have to actually review and test each one to confirm it’s a duplicate (and if so, we just remove the duplicates). But rather than cluttering up the primary project view, which everyone sees, we’re grouping the similar tasks into subtasks, because many of these are just minor changes. One person could go through and complete a couple hundred issues in the span of a week, but we don’t want the main project view filled with several hundred bug and minor change requests… instead, I want to assign a single task to one developer, who will spend a week rocketing through all the tasks. I could do that as a separate project, but that actually means that we’ll have dozens of individual projects that people will be working on for the next few months, when in fact, they’re all working on the same project, just a different set of tasks.

Yeah there’s not an easy solution that I can see. Honestly I know you said you don’t want to do it because it would create more projects (I get that), but I would do projects - add the similar tasks into a project, assign it to one person, have them knock it out. Then you can either archive the project (recommended) or repurpose it for the person/set of tasks.

Maybe just make sure to have a naming scheme for these, like P1 Bug #23432 or what have you.

I think Asana has some use case videos where they talk about having Bug projects that come from various products, using them like an inbox where they’re then sent out. Not quite what you’re dealing with, though =\

I need this ability as well. I need to downgrade a project into a set of tasks in another project. It’s essentially cascading everything down from the Project/Task level from one project to the Task/Subtask level in a different project. I just can’t figure out how to do this without manually rewriting/copying/pasting it all. So here is how it looks:

Please @asana1 team, just give us the option to select mutiple tasks in the list view and moove them inside a task . As this works already with single tasks, it cant be that hard to implement and it would really help a great deal in many ways.